35 Quotes About Polarization

Americans tell pollsters they want bipartisan cooperation. But those who actually vote don’t value that as much—or they define “bipartisanship” as acquiescence by the other party to what their party believes.

Political polarization... is one of the bitter fruits of the secular project, the first effort in history to build cohesive societies without a common set of shared moral and religious values.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.

When very complicated situations collapse into simple 'us versus them' problems, then certainty, hate, and escalatory spirals proliferate and become a driving force for perpetual conflict.

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.

Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being." Thomas Jefferson

... an impression of inescapable noise or acute disorder, a rush of adrenalin, sensations of alarm, a sense of unbalance or chaos, residual feeling of nausea and anxiety. These are the forms of bodily distress that occur when one's ingrained, taken-for-granted sense of how certain things are - and thus presumably will be and in some sense should be - is suddenly or insistently confronted by something very much at odds with it.

Where did it go, the moderate opine? I can't find it here nor there!'Perhaps then it's twixt the false dichotomy?